The Ancient Art of Recombobulation: Manage Your Outward Time by Managing Your Inner Life
Time management is a modern sport. Most people in human history had their time managed for them, through physical labor: if, for example, you have to spin flax or wool to weave the cloth for every garment you own, or dig up tubers, or stalk game, or herd livestock, or chop firewood, this takes up a lot of time.
Choosing how to use your time to the extent that we moderns can is a luxury for our species; however, our experience of the passage of time — feeling anxious, distracted, unfocused, unmotivated — these are ancient problems. (See, for example, the excellent book The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction.)
And because this is such an ancient problem, there are spiritual principles from various traditions that touch on how we live through our time, how we experience the time that we have.
Have you ever wondered how some people remain so calm in chaotic situations? How some people gain perspective, come to a sense of inner peace? A few lucky souls are born with calm temperaments, but the rest of us have to practice calming ourselves, and finding a sense of inner peace despite what is going on around us.
If you are waiting for the world to straighten itself out before you can allow yourself to have a sense of inner peace, the world has already won. But ask anyone who deals with crises and emergencies on a professional basis: you are, in fact, MORE effective at addressing crises when you learn how to keep yourself calmer in the midst of it. A paramedic in a panic helps no one.
Spiritual principles of time management deal with how to prioritize your time and how to experience your time with a greater sense of awareness, peace, focus, and calm. The more you operate from a state of relative calm and peace, the better you will manage, well, pretty much anything.
Right your ship.
This post is the first of a series on spiritual principles of time management.
And first, a promise: I’m not going to tell you how to meditate, I’m not going to tell you how to pray, or even that you have to do any of these things to find inner peace and calm; although personally I believe they help quite a lot. Hopefully you have your own wisdom tradition to draw on that can teach you more about the specifics of these practices, as done in your own spiritual community.
However, because we are all human, when it comes to things like managing our time and attention, I see common threads from various traditions. In this series of posts, I’m going to share some teachings from spiritual communities that specifically address how to manage your time and your attention.
When most people want to get better at managing their time, they look for information from the secular world about getting organized. They look to the business world and they look to resources on household management. And undeniably, this information can be very helpful.
We do not usually turn to spiritual traditions for time management principles, but we ought to. Spiritual matters address the whole person, not just the tasks you check off on your list.
Your inner state matters when it comes to managing your time. So do your priorities when it comes to what kind of life you want to have, or what kind of person you want to be in this world. This is what spiritual principles of time management address.
Time Management with Classic Productivity Principles: “Getting Organized”
It is new for our species to use multiple streams of communication like texts, emails, and chat apps, when for most of human history the only way we communicated was in person. Getting organized to manage your time at work is largely about learning how to manage deadlines effectively: dealing with projects, calendars, metrics, and task lists which all have due dates.
It is also new for our species to have enough clothing to fill a walk-in closet. (I once lived in an 18th-century farmhouse where the original closets were about the width of a chimney; and could hold the contents of maybe five clothes hangers.) Getting organized to manage your time at home is largely about learning how to manage routines effectively: dealing with the workflows around cooking, cleaning, and maintenance, which do not generally have formal due dates (unless you’re planning, say, a Thanksgiving dinner) but do have predictable cycles.
But it is not at all new for our species to deal with strong emotions or trains of thought that swamp our perspective and our peace of mind.
It is not at all new for our species to deal with the consciousness of time passing without our control; and with the frequent disconnect between what we would like to happen, and what we are facing in reality, in the present moment.
Getting organized to manage your time with spiritual principles is about learning to manage your self. It is about learning to manage the flow of your attention and your personal energies. It is about doing things in such a way that you take good care of your inner life.
Whereas secular advice about time management is about managing things in the outer world — communications and closets — spiritual advice about time management is more about managing things within you, in your own mind and spirit, although certainly if you follow these principles this will affect your life outwardly as well.
Time Management with Classic Spiritual Principles: “Getting Yourself Together,” or, Recombobulation
Spiritual principles of time management are about ways to manage your attention and your schedule so that you can live much of your life from a baseline inner state of peace and calm; a state of relaxed focus.
I think of it as going from feeling discombobulated to recombobulating. Feeling peaceful, relaxed, prepared, and calm.
The Milwaukee airport has a dedicated space after travelers pass through security, called the “Recombobulation Area.” You can regroup, reorganize your things, and gather yourself together before carrying on with your trip. I think of spiritual principles of time management as recombobulation practices. They pull us together, they bring our mind, body, and spirit into one place again. And that is the foundation of inner peace and calm.
If classic workplace and household productivity principles are about managing your personal information (contacts and communications), your commitments (projects and deadlines), and your routines (dishes and meals and laundry), spiritual principles are about managing your inner state — your emotions, your ideals for the kind of person you want to be as you live your life — and managing how you live out your most deeply held values; that is, what you hope to make real in the world through the way that you live your life.
Quite often when you work with managing your inner life, your outer life will become more peaceful and organized as well.
I've written elsewhere on this blog about keeping a personal rule of life (often called here a personal framework), which is a way to manage time that came from Christian monastic communities. (In fact, I am currently working on a book about that.)
But beyond that, spiritual traditions have a lot to say about how we manage our time and attention in such a way that grows our inner lives, and grows our sense of inner peace and calm. I find when I've come across spiritual teachings from Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist practitioners about dealing with time, that a lot of similar ideas show up.
That is because human wisdom traditions are dealing with the same ornery critter: you, and me. Human beings with similar needs for focused work and for rest. Human beings with similar challenges dealing with deadlines and distractions, chores and interruptions, moods and mayhem.
Operating from a state of inner calm and peace helps you to make better decisions, helps you to prioritize better, helps you to know what you can let go of, and draws you toward what is truly valuable for you to focus on.
And just as our physical bodies suffer when we don't feed them well or move them regularly, our inner lives — our souls, our spirits — suffer when we don’t feed our attention well, or move them wisely.
Your inner life isn't going anywhere; and when it is neglected, it will show up as mental and physical symptoms.
So, the first spiritual principle of time management that is foundational to all the rest, is this: Manage your outward time, by managing your inner life.
Let the cultivation of your own inner peace and calm be your starting point. Let that form your basic training for how you play our modern sport of time management.
I hope with this series to share some old ideas, some time-honored practices, that will help you to do just that.
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Notes
I recombobulate myself by stamping things with rubber stamps, like the illustration for this post. Get your own AI-free mode of illustration from Leavenworth Jackson.
References
Kreiner, J. (2023) The wandering mind: what medieval monks tell us about distraction. First edition. New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Independent Publishers Since 1923.
“Reflecting on the world’s only ‘Recombobulation Area’ signs” (2023) OnMilwaukee. Available at: https://onmilwaukee.com/articles/recombobulationsigns (Accessed: 27 May 2025).